Monday, November 24, 2014

Staunton, November 24 – Loose talk
by Vladimir Putin and others in Moscow about using nuclear weapons not only has
united the West in ways that nothing else, including Russian aggression in
Ukraine, could, but it is spreading fear among those near Putin about their
future prospects in such a brave new world, according to Yuri Fedorov.

“The logic of the Kremlin” in making
such remarks, the Russian analyst says, “is understandable: the West is weak
and cowardly, it won’t stand up to a nuclear confrontation with Russia, it will
retreat, and it will allow ‘little green men’ to seize let us say the Baltics
and then completely capitulate” (ru.krymr.com/content/article/26701065.html).

And as a result of that
capitulation, those around the Kremlin calculate, “the consequences of the
greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century” as Putin has
called the disintegration of the Soviet Union “will be corrected.”

That Putin might make that
calculation is hardly surprising. Indeed, he is hardly “original,” but he
clearly does not understand the full dimensions of the precedents on which he
is acting, Fedorov says. In the late 1940s, Stalin unleashed the Berlin crisis,
and the result was the formation of NATO.

In the early 1960s, Khrushchev
decided to put Soviet missiles in Cuba, and the result of that was not only the
Cuban missile crisis which reunified the West but led to his ouster.And in the 1970s, Brezhnev put
intermediate-range missiles in eastern Europe thinking to divide the West but
that action had exactly the opposite effect.

Now, “by threatening NATO with
nuclear war, Putin and his entourage are committing two mistakes, each of which
may cost them dearly. As long as the standoff with the US and Europe was
limited to the Ukrainian problem, both in Washington and in European capitals,
people could and certainly would have liked to find a compromise and détente,
taking into consideration at least in part Kremlin phobias and ambitions.”

“But Europe and the United States
could not tolerate a nuclear threat,” Fedorov continues. “It is too dangerous,”
especially when, as German Chancellor Angela Merkel has suggested, the person
with his finger on the nuclear button is someone who appears to be living in “another
reality.”

Putin’s second
mistake, Fedorov argues, may be even more immediately consequential to
him.He appears to have “ignored the
instinct for self-preservation” within the Russian ruling class. The several
thousand people in this group are not distinguished by moral qualities, but
none of them could have entered it without a well-developed “sense of danger”
and the ability to defend themselves against threats.

According to
Fedorov, “hardly any of the current bureaucrats wants to exchange the well-
being” he now enjoys “for the doubtful satisfaction of living in conditions of
a mobilized economy, a harsh military-chekist culture, and a national-patriotic
miasma.” Their plans have never included “balancing on the edge of war.”

What that means,
of course, is that Putin’s fate may now be in the hands of the anything but
sympathetic members of the entourage around him, a group whose members will
want to save themselves even if they have to sacrifice him.